Doping doctor 'worked in various sports'

Madrid - A Spanish doctor on trial over a major blood doping racket involving top professional cyclists said Tuesday he had worked for athletes in “all kinds” of sports.

“I worked with individual sportspersons... of all kinds,” Eufemanio Fuentes, 57, who is charged with public health offences, told the court in Madrid.

Police detained Fuentes in 2006 when they seized 200 bags of blood and other evidence of performance-enhancing transfusions, in an investigation dubbed “Operation Puerto”.

Fuentes, who is on trial along with his sister and three other defendants from the cycling world, told the court on Tuesday that “most” of the sportspersons he was working for in 2006 were cyclists.

Investigators at the time listed 58 cyclists suspected in the scandal.

Of those, only six have received sporting sanctions: Spanish rider Alejandro Valverde, Germans Jan Ullrich and Joerg Jaksche and Italians Ivan Basso, Michele Scarponi and Giampaolo Caruso, who was later cleared by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Fuentes's lawyer Julian Perez-Templado told AFP after Monday's hearing that the doctor would not reveal any more names of people for whom he carried out blood transfusions.